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nerdyH writes "As early as last quarter, Microsoft admitted that Linux and netbooks were eating into its fat profits. Recently, it came home, with the software giant announcing its first-ever layoffs. LinuxDevices interviewed Linux Foundation Director Jim Zemlin on Linux's role in Microsoft's misfortunes. Zemlin sums it up pretty well: 'Companies can offer their own branded software platform based on Linux. If Microsoft is getting 75 percent margins, you would like some of that high-margin business, too.'"

Doesn't sound like it if he's supporting warrantless wiretapping just like Bush did. Same old crap. You bought into the hype of a politician who broke his own campaign financing promise to forego public financing in order to raise as much as he wanted without any government oversight. Screw the campaign finance laws we passed after Nixon! Very, very bad precedent that will bite us in the ass in the future since all politicians will forego public funding having seen what Obama was able to accomplish with

The bill is about decentralization of the Federal Government. You probably hope that it means that the federal government will stop abortions and make us all pray in school. Sorry. That's not what it is about. It is about returning power to the states and allowing states to have their own moral agenda. Since the USA is a federation of states, the idea is that people are still free to move from states with whom they disagree about moral conduct and into states where they agree. Some people actually still bel

Republics of Ex-Yugoslavia had the right not to join the federation after the WWII. Once they joined the federation, they had no legal rights to leave. I should know that, my parents come from there.:-)

I most sincerely doubt it's different in any other country in the world - no part of any country can just say "sorry guys, good-bye, we're leaving." and expect the rest of the country to say "oh, swell, farewell and send us a post card!"

The thing is, originally it was the states that were seen as the countries, not the union. Each was it's own little country loosely associated. Somewhere along the line the union stopped being an association of countries and grew to be seen as THE country. At that time some of the states wanted out.

It'd be akin to the United States suddenly declaring that we no longer wish to part of the United Nations. Right now we all see that as clear cut: the UN is a loose organization and if our country wants to le

Also, if you look at the trend in Microsoft Windows "market share" estimated by people like Net Applications [hitslink.com], you can see that the decline of Windows started long before the housing bubble deflated. They were still being rated at 96% of the market in 2004 and 2005 and have been in what looks like continuous decline ever since. Granted, it's not much of a decline yet, only 7% or so according to Net Applications, but it does serve as evidence that Microsoft's troubles did not start with the economic crisis, the economic crisis may have compounded their existing troubles though.

I think that what has probably happened is that MS knows their share has been declining but hasn't had to lay anybody off because the decline simply allowed them to not replace people who left through natural attrition. The economic slowdown made people more likely to hang on the security of their job and forced them to let go the people who would normally have left on their own.

that and their reliance on temps. They could close and shuffle offices far bigger than this without a peep. They used to hide "right sizing" in the legions of temps.. but of course now it's better to shed the real employees and keep the temps!

They're just saying this to "look busy" so the stock market will still like them.

They used to hide "right sizing" in the legions of temps.. but of course now it's better to shed the real employees and keep the temps!

Ya think? Having been a temp in this whole blue-badge, green-badge continuous reorganization scheme I can speak to this. In this environment the temp's got a lot of leverage. He can afford to call a turd a turd and not say it has potential. He can make fun of PHBs. He can do honest work and contribute without fear his out-of-scale achievements become the flag that gets him targeted for political career assassination. He can take bigger risks without fear of being labeled a 10%er. He has the power of laughter, and oh, what a power that is. He can do this because - what are they going to do? Fire him?

But this isn't Microsoft specific. I've never worked for them and I probably won't - they would have to pay enough more than I was worth to make me feel like I was exploiting them. Seinfeld money maybe. I would for what he got paid, and I think I could give them what they got for what they paid him.

They're just saying this to "look busy" so the stock market will still like them.

Agreed. Do you think anybody will notice their stock is worth half of what it was ten years ago today? Apple's good for 10x your money in the same period. For you 401K folks that's the leverage that investing in a growth company gives you. Companies that have achieved monopoly have no growth potential - the best they can hope for is graceful decline potentially (but rarely) followed by a bet-the company reinvention of process. This is going to surprise a lot of you dollar-cost-averaging investors, but betting that a company will survive the retirement of its founders is a very bad bet. If you start investing in a company at the beginning of your working life, and keep your money in that company throughout your careers, 95% of the time you'll lose it all because founders of companies don't have longer working lives than you do.

And I think that can be directly traced to them losing their way and ignoring their core markets. One of MSFT's biggest customers have always been business. From the littlest SOHO to the largest enterprise MSFT has been right there making boring as hell backwards compatible low resource business OSes. But then with Vista they suddenly take a giant turn into left field and completely blow off their core market to get into a multimedia pissing contest with Apple.

I mean it is no wonder you have so many sites like this [msdn.com] and this [sapphiresteel.com] showing step by step how to turn Win2k8 server into a desktop. It is because MSFT has abandoned their business users to try to compete with Apple in the multimedia space. Which frankly is insane as Apple has this little thing called the iPod that pretty much gives them the lock on the multimedia space, not to mention the hip factor, and the amount of money they make off of business licenses and support contracts is worth FAR more than the niche they are trying to muscle their way into.

Mark my words, and the MSFT shills can mod me down all you want, but the biggest threat to MSFT is MSFT. They are neglecting their core markets, they are flailing around from one idea to another like the company has ADHD, and by trying to stuff everyone on the planet into this giant bling bling multimedia OS they are screwing over one of their biggest customers, the business users. I mean, is there anyone here with a straight face that can say Vista was made for business? The thing practically screams HTPC! It is like they fired all their business and accounting guys and put some marketing drone in charge of the whole company. And worse, the drone wants to be as cool as Apple so bad it hurts.

Mark my words, if they do not get some common sense and make another business OS then companies like Red Hat will be more than happy to take a shot at those customers. If they want a single codebase, fine and dandy. Make a "Win2k10 Pro" out of Win2K8 server and leave Win7 for the home users. But I truly believe that Win7 will bomb, just as hard if not harder than Vista. And when it does all those corporations that have been ignored for two OS releases will start to look for alternatives.

Please, PLEASE don't forget folks we say the SAME thing when Vista was in pre release. Remember all the hype? Remember how the guys at places like Win supersite tripped over themselves to say how wonderful Vista was? Sadly reality didn't live up to the hype then, and I seriously doubt it will this time either. I have been showing the shots of Win7 to SOHO and small business customers(I haven't had the time to pick up the beta yet) and their reaction has been completely consistent "Yuck". Actually that was t

But that doesn't address the more fundamental problem, which is MSFT completely ignoring one of their biggest markets which is a consistent breadwinner(business customers) to suddenly switch gears and ONLY release a home OS. Don't take my word for it, read this article [infoworld.com] from the enterprise desktop perspective. The conclusion? "Just as consumer-focused as Vista. Home Groups. Media Sharing. Federated Search. All very cool. All very slick. And all very much irrelevant to the enterprise desktop customer"

Completely agree. I don't think the 1% user share that Linux has is cutting into Microsoft that much - plus, MS's Win2k8 is apparently doing well, and I've heard a lot of people say they actually like it.

Not to mention this choice quote:

'Companies can offer their own branded software platform based on Linux.

I know very few companies that have "their own branded software platform based on Linux." That sounds like they're talking about releasing a custom Linux OS branded with their company? Is that really that prevalent? It's a lot easier (and you don't have to hire super spe

I suspect, both from the statement, and from the fact that this is a Linux Devices interview, that the "own branded software platform[s]" in question are more likely to be replacing WinCE or WinNT/XP Embedded(which does, indeed, seem to be happening a fair amount). To a lesser extent(though still a notable one) netbooks have been doing some of the same.

Completely agree. I don't think the 1% user share that Linux has is cutting into Microsoft that much - plus, MS's Win2k8 is apparently doing well, and I've heard a lot of people say they actually like it.

This is what I've been saying for a while now... The Year of Linux on the Desktop is often touted (and even more often mocked), but it is becoming the wrong concept.
Sure, desktops will not go away so soon. But we are most definitely moving towards more mobile devices. The shift from the desktop to the laptop is quite significant, though the platform is much the same. I'm thinking about the transition from the phone to the mobile phone: netbooks will gain popularity, and who knows which other devices will e

I don't think we'll be abandoning desktops anytime terribly soon, either... for one thing, people like big screens, not tiny screens.

The only thing I could see is either working with data in different ways using something unlike the desktop environment we're used to or docking. I'd love a device that I slip in to a screen / casing so it acts like a PDA / smartphone. Then when I get to the office, I dock it to my screen and keyboard (like I do with my laptop) and it becomes my full-sized-feeling workstation.

Yes, Linux definitely has had an impact in the server world - but then, UNIX was around, IIRC, before a server edition of Windows ever existed, right? So it's Windows that has to "break" into that market, not the other way around.

This is what's interesting with this sector. Unix systems ruled the earth (well, OK.

It's not just the more enterprise market share that Linux can get. It's also the threat of more market share as a negotiation tactic. Before companies didn't have much choice. Windows or higher priced Unix servers. Now they can negotiate with MS. MS lowers their pricing or they threaten to migrate to Linux.

Also the Linux threat in the interview is not just in the Enterprise Server market. Embedded devices and netbooks are going with Linux due to its ability to run lean. Vista is not currently lean enough for these applications. XP is lean enough though but not as customizable as Linux.

Redhat and Novell/SuSe offer their Linux solutions. IBM and HP will support these distros and others. That's 4 major players right there. Also this doesn't just apply to companies. China has their own brand and Russia is exploring one as well.

Embedded devices and netbooks are going with Linux due to its ability to run lean.

It has been known for at least 20 years that systems-on-a-chip or embedded systems were going to take off - although it has not been until wireless communication and true-color displays have become affordable that this has happened.

For many years, Microsoft could specify the standard of hardware required to run their OS, and the hardware vendors had to obey in order to get compatibility certification.

Linux distro developers did not have that level of influence over the hardware developers and so had to modularize their software in order to adapt to hardware with limited memory and resources.

By not having this evolutionary pressure, Microsoft have really pushed themselves into a very restricted evolution path, and just hope that memory increases enough to run the embedded versions of their OS.

The current crop of netbooks are powerful enough to run Vista. They don't run Vista because Microsoft has special netbook pricing for Windows XP. A reduced-price version of XP is a good move for Microsoft in that it stemmed the tide of Linux adoption, but it has signaled lower margins for Microsoft.

If the netbook version of Windows 7 doesn't come with a reduced price then Linux is likely to make up some ground on these devices. If the netbook version of Windows 7 does come with a reduced price, then Microsoft will still continue to see lower revenue. Either way competition from Linux hurts Microsoft. As the extreme low end of the spectrum becomes more and more powerful (and useful) Microsoft is going to be under increased pressure to sell Windows for less.

Of course, Windows 7 could make up some ground on the high end. I suppose it is possible that Windows 7 will be so cool that the release of Windows 7 will reverse the trend on the high end towards Apple's products, but I don't see that happening.

The problem isn't that the version of XP used on netbooks took some time and effort to create. The problem is that netbooks running XP are being sold instead of netbooks running a much more expensive version of Windows.

Even just a few years ago no OEM had that sort of leverage over Microsoft. You either built hardware that worked with existing versions of Windows (with existing cost structures) or you didn't build a device at all. With the netbook Microsoft showed that it was willing to cave on price if the alternative was a PC running Linux.

Sure, the netbook version of XP wasn't expensive to create, but Microsoft's R&D department is essentially a fixed cost. The bit that this particular set of articles missed is that Microsoft's unit sales actually increased by 1% in this last quarter, but revenue on those sales was down 8%. Clearly this is better than losing those sales to Linux, but it still amounts to nearly a 10% price reduction on the sale price of Windows due to competition from Linux.

Now clearly this isn't going to drive Microsoft out of business any time soon, but it certainly worries investors. If future trends see Microsoft selling less software at lower prices then they'll want to see changes made.

That's an excellent point. Microsoft didn't come out with special pricing until it was clear that the netbook was a runaway hit.

It's also important to note that the Tier 1 OEMs like Dell and HP weren't the slightest bit interested in upsetting the status quo until a relative upstart on the consumer scene showed that there was money to be made. For HP, Dell, and others near the top of the heap the current Windows marketplace suits them just fine. They get the bulk of Microsoft's marketing money. As lon

Blame Linux if you want, but the real problem lies with the crappy job MSI did putting Linux on its netbook. I don't know if they are still doing it but their original Linux preloads didn't even support all of the hardware on the netbook. Either way, it's not like MSI Wind has stopped offering Linux. A few years ago gettin

What, I'm serious. While my netbook has a smaller hard drive than the desktop I bought with Vista when Vista first came out, it has more memory a nicer video card, and the hard drive is solid state. The processor is more than fast enough to meet Microsoft specs.

My netbook could easily run Vista. It just doesn't. That's more a function of the discounted price Microsoft is offering on XP than anything else. Well, that and the fact that I bought a netbook running Linux. Heck, HP will even sell you a ne

When an OEM negotiates a price agreement with Microsoft, they now have a viable alternative. It changes the negotiating relationship.

1% isn't that much, but Microsoft MUST make deals with EVERY major OEM to keep their position, and before Microsoft had the leverage to ensure that every OEM MUST have Windows. The game has changed, and even though every OEM is still going to sell Windows, having Linux on the table to wave in their face makes Microsoft sweat a little. Especially with netbooks because an OEM CAN walk away if they don't get whatever price they feel like asking. Apple sells its own products, so what did Microsoft have to compete against? Nothing! While it isn't much, Linux offers not just competitive options for users, but OEMs. The fat Microsoft had before was the monopoly. Remember that market share is only a warning sign of monopolistic practices; remember Cisco Systems and their investigation? Cisco successfully argued that their market share is directly related to innovation and a superior product, nothing else. Microsoft on the other hand HAS been playing dirty. Microsoft is now being forced to play in the real world where a Microsoft computer tax will no longer be status quo.

I think they mean company branded Linux in the same way HP, Dell, and the old Compaq and others brand Windows and the machine bios. I'll agree this isn't any kind of advantage, but only because this was always reasonably easy to do with Windows.

Windows sales (or at least revenue) shrank by 8% (CNN blames Vista sales in particular [cnn.com]). Since PC/Server sales in the industry overall didn't drop (let alone by that much), and netbooks only count for 5% of the whole market (with Windows + Linux netbooks combined in that figure), it stands to reason that there are other factors besides economic malaise that contributed to the losses.

I'm no business analyst, but obviously Linux (the netbook market in particular) is severely cutting into the profits of computer giants like Microsoft, Apple, Intel, and IBM. If you needed a sign for the year of Linux, this is it!

I'm no business analyst, but obviously Linux (the netbook market in particular) is severely cutting into the profits of computer giants like Microsoft, Apple, Intel, and IBM. If you needed a sign for the year of Linux, this is it!

Well, I've got a circa-1998 333MHz Pentium II processor with 128 MB of memory running my file server at the house. If it wasn't for Linux, I'd have replaced it a loooong time ago with some of that new fancy-shmancy Intel stuff. Now it sits there for months between reboots and hardly draws any power. And when that goes, I've got an 800MHz beastie waiting in the wings to take over.

Yeah, it couldn't be because there is a massive economic crisis going on. It's all Linux.

Microsoft is getting beaten down by Apple at the high end and by Linux on the netbook space. Obviously, I don't mean that people are buying linux netbooks. Hold your horses there. But MS's bargaining position has changed because of linux. They could have said in 2002 that netbooks should cost $600, because of the $200 windows copy. But that does not apply anymore. They sell XP for $28-$32. This is a huge relative loss to what they were making.

And at the high end, Apple is all over it. Take a look at bestbuy. It is rare to find a $1000+laptop, Apple notwithstanding. Or take a look at Amazon's best seller list, only to find hordes of netbooks and macbooks, perhaps with a 1 in 20 Vista machine.

To make matters worse (for MS), if these high-end phones and proposed tablets such as the techcrunch one come to life, they won't be using windows. Nothing below $300 can afford windows, even at $32.

Finally, MS's stock price has been walking sideways for years and years and years. They cannot bring the best talent in the basis of money or stock options alone. This is not the year of linux on the desktop. But its presence is being felt in the markets undergoing disruptive innovation [wikipedia.org], like the netbooks.

Agreed. And that's aside from the fact that no one should be celebrating job losses anyway. Granted, it would be nice if devs would quit microsoft in favour of paid work for a free desktop project, but job losses are never good, and it's just cheap to gloat over them. Those people have lives to live, dreams to fulfill, kids to feed, etc. Yes, microsoft as a company sucks. But really... grow the fuck up, and don't misrepresent free software's ideals please. We're about making lives better, not celebrat

>> Of course the Linux guy will say Linux. And the Apple guy Apple. So on and so forth. And there is probably a mixture of truth to all that.>> Oh, and that little global economic crisis may have something there, too...

Yeah, because no one is going to be more interested in a ZERO COST product during a global economic crisis.

Of course: as others have said, this isn't the first recession that Microsoft has seen.

>> a ZERO COST product>> Technically, copying Vista costs the same as copying Ubuntu. Development is already paid for.

What you are describing is a FELONY.

You personally don't get to make extra copies of Windows and sell them.

Although you bring up a good point. As Linux has been rising up as a reasonablealternative, Microsoft at the same time has been making it more difficult forcasual pirates to copy their OS. This is a real corporate brain fart.

I think Jurily's point was that an economic downturn wouldn't necessarily make people switch to Linux, but rather would increase the volume of Windows piracy instead.

I really need to articulate my thoughts more clearly.

My point: Microsoft does not sell tangible stuff, like cars. They already paid most of the money they needed to make their product. The cost of making more of said product is negligible. They have a huge profit per new units sold. Maybe, if they lowered their prices, they could sell more.

He points out many catalysts, but mainly that companies like HP and IBM and Google are innovating, creating high margin platforms from which people can make more money, whereas Microsoft is only being reactionary and relying on lock-in.

I also thought the point that Office makes more than the operating system does was a great point. How can Microsoft react to things like OpenOffice? They don't have any ideas right now, that I can tell.

The article cited the ODF fiasco, which indicates their degree of dependence on the Office revenue stream. The mere existence of Open Office, Google Docs and the like gives people a valid alternative - and wakes them up the fact that they have a choice as to whether they want to be held hostage to proprietary data formats.

MS doesn't innovate, they copy, then leverage their market share...and the market responded.

I think most of their lost profits are from people negotiating lower prices because of the Linux alternative, not so much that people are actually choosing Linux.

From TFA... Actually the first question in TFA.

Q1 -- Jim, thank you for your support in talking with LinuxDevices today. Do you think it was really Linux that hurt Microsoft? Or was it the emergence of netbooks? XP seems to ship on most, but Microsoft isn't making much money selling XP for low-cost PCs [story], are they?

A1 -- When an OEM negotiates a price agreement with Microsoft, they now have a viable alternative. It changes the negotiating relationship. It's a combination of Linux, missteps by Microsoft, and not enabling Vista for a low-power, long battery-life device.

I wonder if you can be modded insightfull for "insights" from the article? No one reads them anyway...

Have you ever considered just actually using Linux? That machine's so underpowered that it can't play games, which is the only thing that Windows really has over Linux any more. That, or if you need to run MS Office for professional reasons, but if you're pirating the OS I'd hope you're not doing that.

That certainly seems to be the case in netbooks. Once MS got going there, the proportion of netbooks running linux dropped fairly sharply. On the other hand, MS had to commit to keeping XP's corpse stumbling along a while longer, and for only peanuts a unit. That must have sucked.

Ironically, Linux probably does more to strangle MS's non-OS products than it does its OS products. Historically, MS's non windows/office divisions have had a great deal of strategic freedom, because MS could afford to keep burn

Making $4 Billion in one quarter isn't much a decline. Looks like layoffs were induced by greed, so that executives stocks options go up. It would be interesting to see if some of those 4000-5000 employees use linux as a platform for a technology startup.

On the bright side if I were laid-off I'd have plenty of time to juggle [youtube.com].

Most large corporate layoffs are for greed reasons only. to make the books look a little better for next quarter. It's trendy right now and you wont be questioned if you do.. Look GM is dying! we can too!!!

There is a crapload of shady things going on right now in the business world. Look at every bit of it with a heavy dose of skepticism and never ever trust a company as far as you can physically throw it.

Sure, companies should keep on dead wood through a decline so that they don't just ride the edge but they go over and EVERYONE loses their jobs.

I know that it's a popular option around here for the future of MS but try to understand that keeping the same staff to produce less product isn't a very good business model. A company should not be forced into the red before they do what's best. AFAIC Microsoft has an obligation to shareholders to keep things running in a possitive direction.

Netbooks are NOT that big a market yet. It just became a market in late 2008. Too recent for any conclusive statements to be made.

But even if that were the case, it is well within Microsoft's power to keep WindowsXP alive and supported for use on Netbook devices. I have seen some custom loads that run extremely well on the ASUS 900. They can do what they want -- it's their retiring OS.

Microsoft isn't losing because of Linux, it's losing because of Microsoft.

Essentially, if MS dominated the industry by creating the BEST product, then they wouldn't have a problem. Their problem is simply that their target customer isn't willing to be abused any longer. That and the of years of abuse have pushed millions of victims to contribute to the creation and improvement of alternatives to Microsoft.

Exactly. They are reaping what they've sown with their Windows-for-everything strategy. That worked against Lotus, Borland, Netscape, etc... ten years ago. But where is the Windows iPod? The Windows iPhone? The Windows Android? Innovations are sidestepping Windows.

Of course, Microsoft has the technical ability to do so as well, but organizationally, that's like asking Detroit to make a small car.

In the face of credible and supported competition that's FREE, it becomes hard to justify to PHB's that they'll need to spend a few grand per server on licenses (plus hopping on the license upgrade merry-go-round every couple of years) to do the same work.

On the desktop side, it's the same deal. Trying to shoehorn in a few hundred bucks of worthless software licenses onto devices that are going to be priced in the low to mid hundreds is going to be a non-starter for the companies that want to sell the devi

time to pass the crack pipe son. Yes MS is shrinking, just like the world economy. linux has made in roads in some markets, but it's completely dwarfed by MS's market share and probably will be for the forseeable future.

instead of boasting you've toppled MS, try going back to fixing the numerous issues with linux software that keep it off the desktop.

Companies can offer their own branded software platform based on Linux. If Microsoft is getting 75 percent margins, you would like some of that high-margin business, too.

This makes absolutely no sense. First, there is no reasonable way to calculate a profit margin on a copy of Windows or Office. This is not a car or a book. The incremental cost of producing one copy of Windows is nearly zero. There's no way to quantify MS's investment in their software. What would you do, try to estimate how many man-hour

i have been looking a lot at netbooks online, at best buy and at staples and microcneter, and it is hard to even find a linux netbook - I seriously doubt this has caused any significant harm to MSBut, be glad to see some actual sales dataAnyway, the whole idea that linux is better or cheaper then MS is not true for the avg user,

The first netbooks were all linux, because they were all sporting 4 GB SSDs. Within about a year, a lot of the models had 8 GB or larger SSDs or 160 GB regular laptop drives, and they almost all came with XP home. I think MS may have put together a special XP-Lite, low cost package to push linux out of the netbooks.

But how many Vista netbooks do you see? The fact that MS has had to continue to allow companies to us XP in new products is a slap in the face to MS, and really hurts their profits. Microsoft has no choice but to allow XP to be used (and very cheaply) or face those companies moving to Linux.

Yes, Linux marketed as a distro can do better. The good thing is that very soon, we'll have KDE with a business friendly license. What I would like Linux programmers to do is to get their act together and solve problems that continue to plague the Linux ecosystem.

These come to mind:

1: Multimedia. There are so many back-ends to choose from, each with problems of their own. The associated front-ends are even worse both in functionality and bloat.

2: Polish. It seams that by default, Linux distros are less polished by default. In fact, I can say they are ugly by default. This does not help.

3: Bloat. KDE is wonderful but suffers from bloat. GNOME is kind of OK, but it's interface looks ancient and lacks the functionality of modern systems.

1. Every word was true. If not, where is the nonsense? I call shenanigans. Saying "nonsense" is the alternative to admitting that you don't have a valid argument.

2. If eye candy sells, why is XP more popular than Vista? Why is the most eye-candy Linux not the most popular Linux? Eye candy, in fact, is not the only thing that sells. People want their computer to work when they want it to work.

3. An overcomplicated GUI doesn't mean the software is bloated. Windows is overall far more bloated. But less of the options are available to the user. You have to go tunneling through the registry creating arcane DWORDs (OSX is no better, putting you off in plist land) instead of just being able to run a config program. The excessive complexity of the KDE gui is perfectly desirable to some, which is why we also have GNOME. Both are skinnable, and both can be made to draw their windows with the other's widgets, so all the apps look the same (just heading off the inevitable incompatibility argument.)

What's wrong with Linux is mostly marketing, although there are some areas of spectactular failure, like bluetooth.

Under absolutely no circumstances should ANY Linux application be "installed" by typing./configure; make; make install. Those steps are for DEVELOPERS and MAINTAINERS only to MAKE packages (RPM, DEB.)

Couple things. RPM and DEB need a standard and understood hierarchy. DEB wins out here. There is less variability in the configuration of DEB, and a great deal of variability in RPM (SUSE, Mandriva, Fedora.) This creates problems that could be solved if someone created a "Unified RPM standard". As far as the RPM and DEB differences are concerned, its my opinion that dpkg and RPM should be interchangable on both systems without having to "convert" from Alien. For example, if I am a Mandriva user, and Ubuntu has something I want, I should be able to set up dpkg and rpm to understand each other and retrieve the DEB Packages from Ubuntu.

There do need to be improvements in SDL, SDL is getting stale.

Another issue is Upstream maintainers. Upstream coders are coding some of these applications with bizzare and stupid configurations that don't work well with EITHER Package manager and all they provide is a tar ball. And then you look at their Windows build, and in some cases its easier to install the Windows Build in Wine. Thats unforgivable.

However, I think that what we are seeing right now is not the outright resistance to Linux. Its not that Linux sucks, its just that Adobe, and Quicken, and several of these ISVs have strictly Anti-Linux policies. Its kinda the same thing as when you see these heavily DRMed web sites that Are Windows+IE only because they rely on IE DRM, and have a written policy against Linux OR Mac.

The fact is, they hate Linux, not because it sucks, not because its hard to write applications for, its that THEY HATE LINUX. Its not rational, its not anything there is a reasonable excuse for. They just hate Linux and they want to see Linux die.

I was an employee of Microsoft in end user tech support in '94. I'd been a contractor for six months, then I went perm. About a month going perm, all ~200 of the remaining contractors at my worksite were let go, every last one of them. (This was including my roommate at the time.)

So whe they call this the "first ever" layoff for the company, take that with a (salt lick sized) grain of salt. Sure, it might be the first ever for "perm" employees, btu I frankly don't see the difference.

I think Microsoft will still dominate market share until Google makes an OS based on FreeBSD. Until then, Microsoft's biggest competitor is itself because while their software is over-priced, most people just keep reusing their old XP disk rather than trying to learn something new. Linux doesn't have the marketing power required to take on Microsoft no matter how good the software is. I'm not a fortune-teller, but if I were, this would be my prediction.

Not to mention the fact that if companies *did* start selling machines with their own flavors of Linux I'm sure they'd quickly spiral into garbage. Think of the crapware on budget PCs. Now imagine an entire OS bastardized, branded and sold to the highest bidder. I could see custom manufacturer Linux distros quickly becoming a total nightmare.

Not to mention the fact that if companies *did* start selling machines with their own flavors of Linux I'm sure they'd quickly spiral into garbage. Think of the crapware on budget PCs. Now imagine an entire OS bastardized, branded and sold to the highest bidder. I could see custom manufacturer Linux distros quickly becoming a total nightmare.

No, different situation. Vendors don't control their Linux customer base nearly as much as with MSWindows. A bastardized Linux can be relatively easily replaced with

Linux's mere existence has always had a competitive influence on Microsoft. However, it wasn't until recently that Linux was truly a competitive threat as a desktop for end users. Heck, I've been using Linux on my desktop since 1995, but I haven't really believed it was a viable replacement for Windows for normal folk until fairly recently (and then only in fairly specific situations).

It's hard to argue that Linux doesn't represent a threat now, however. After all, Microsoft resurrected Windows XP and sold it at a steep discount as a specific reaction to Linux adoption on the low end. If Linux didn't Asus and the other netbook vendors wouldn't really have had any choice but to either spec out their netbooks to fit Vista, and sell them at a price point where Vista makes sense.

On a much broader scale Linux and Free Software have been limiting how much Microsoft can charge for software since its inception. This is most visible on the server end, where Linux has a great deal of traction, but it is also visible in areas like development tools, embedded software, etc. As Free Software becomes more visible as competitors to Windows and MS Office Microsoft is going to find it increasingly difficult to defend it's ridiculously high profit margins on these items. At which point Microsoft is likely to become just another software development company instead of the 800 pound gorilla that we all know and love.

Add in most folks already have a computer. And a lot of others have a 2nd computer. MS can't convince them to buy a 3rd or 4th for their home often enough to keep MS's sales rates what they once were. They just aren't losing that much market share. The market for computers is down for a variety of reasons.

Well but that's my point. The percentage of people I "meet" online that use Linux is astonishingly high. Yet in person I've never seen it in practice. And the few Linux people I have met first online and then in person really didn't use Linux anymore than I did - which amounts to having it installed in a VM or on a spare box.In regards to dependancies and app installs, sudo apt-get might be more logical for you than say dragging an application into a folder as you do on the Mac or double-clicking an install

I use Linux exclusively on desktop, laptop and server. I have a couple VMs for the very rare times when I have to compile a windows app, which get booted maybe once a month for the only purpose of doing a build.

At work I have Windows on the computer, but all it gets used for is to start a VM with Linux in it. I turn it on, log in, start vmware, maximize, and do all the work in the VM. The only reason it's there at all is that I'm too busy to justify spending time on reformatting the box.

I've still never met a single person that uses Linux as their primary OS.

I have for the past seven years. Sometimes, for months at a time, as my only OS, until I need to boot XP for a game.

We brag about how its making inroads and how its impacting the marketplace but we rarely see it in person.

Asus EEE PC. The machine's very existence depended on Linux. Once Linux proved you could create something that cheaply, that small, with good battery life, everyone else rushed to get in on it, including Microsoft. But even if XP had really been an option when it was built, MIcrosoft wouldn't give them the price they wanted.

So, whether or not it actually makes it onto someone's desktop, the fa

Sure those early operating systems weren't anything compared to the UNIX workstations of the day, but neither were the computers they were running on.

Also, you don't seem to realize that there is nothing that says that an OS has to have certain features to be a good OS.

MS-DOS was a very good OS for standalone workstations where only one user was going to be interacting with the system and only running one application. The early PC's were not really capable of much more anyway, so DOS did what it was intended to do, and did it well enough at the time.

Even though I hate to admit it, Microsoft has brought far more to the industry than you give it credit for. I wish that someone had provided some viable competition all these years to force Microsoft to innovate a bit more, but they pushed the industry fairly well for a monopoly. They didn't really have to, they could have stretched their releases apart by years more than they did and made even more money. Upgrades have never been a big money maker for MS, it's bundling with new pc's they depend upon anyway when people are replacing their computers every couple of years.

Give me an example of what was alternatives that IBM ignored when it chose MS-DOS for the IBM PC. And why they were better (for the target market) than MS-DOS.

I can only think of one OS that was truely better at the time for personal computing, and that was OS-9 (not Mac OS-9)... but I'm not sure that it could have been ported to the Intel 8080 as it was written entirely in assembly and wasn't ported to any other processors until 2 years later in 1983 and not to Intel until 1989.

Sure there were tons of interesting things happening in the personal computing OS space in those days... but when IBM went shopping, there were not really that many choices that would have made good business sense. CP/M would have been the best choice, as it was the most popular... but they wouldn't sign the papers IBM required... hence the reason Gates bought QDOS (a CPM like OS) and renamed it MS-DOS in the first place.

So technically there was nothing for intel processors that was better, and the only os that made better business sense wouldn't sell... that left MS-DOS.

I will agree that MS could have greatly improved on MS-DOS and didn't, favoring compatibility over capability... but don't forget that tons of software of the time was proprietary so it didn't make sense to break compatibility to favor features.

I think if anything, it's IBM's fault for coming into the scene before a decent OS had been ported to intel processors. Hell QNX was only a year later and put DOS to shame... but in technology, it rarely pays to wait.